Intel plans faster bus for Pentium 4 Extreme Edition

IDG News Service - Intel Corp. is planning to introduce a faster front-side bus on an upcoming version of its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor that will help the company increase the performance of its chips by improving a crucial bottleneck in system performance.

According to an internal document on Intel's Web site first spotted by The Inquirer, Intel will soon release the 925XE chip set, a version of its recently introduced 925X chip set with support for a 1,066-MHz front-side bus. Current Pentium 4 chip sets use an 800-MHz front-side bus to connect the processor to the memory. This is a vital link, or bottleneck, that plays an important role in determining the overall performance of a system.

Intel will also release a 3.46-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition that supports the 1,066-MHz front-side bus in the near future, according to a separate document found on Intel's site. This chip will also come with 2MB of Level 3 cache, just like its counterparts in the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition category.

The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip is Intel's performance leader for desktop PCs. But that performance comes at a premium, since the chip costs more than twice as much as the most powerful Pentium 4 processor. It's marketed almost exclusively to gamers.

An Intel spokesman declined to comment on unannounced products.

In previous years, Intel relied on ever-increasing clock speeds to improve the performance of its chips. Over the past year, the company has used other methods such as hyperthreading and cache memory to improve performance as thermal concerns brought on by the arrival of the 90-nanometer process generation have made it more difficult to rely on pure clock speed. However, Intel still needs to marginally increase clock speeds to help improve performance.

Most chip designers feel that the once the clock speed of the processor exceeds four or five times the speed of the front-side bus, the processor is charging ahead of the bus and wasting time waiting for the bus to feed it data, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research Inc. in Cave Creek, Ariz.

With an 800-MHz front-side bus on its 3.4GHz chips, Intel was coming up against that limit, McCarron said. A faster bus will allow the company to increase the clock speed of its chips and take full advantage of those extra clock cycles, he said. Intel has promised to release a 4-GHz Pentium 4 chip in the first quarter of 2005, a mark it had expected to hit this year.

Other companies, most notably Intel rival

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